The Elusive Everyday in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson by Laura E. Tanner

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Elusive Everyday in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson by Laura E. Tanner Ryan Kemp THE ELUSIVE EVERYDAY IN THE FICTION OF MARILYNNE ROBINSON, by Laura E. Tanner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 208 pp. $80.00 hardback. Laura E. Tanner’s The Elusive Everyday in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson argues that Robinson’s fiction has been underestimated. In critics easy praise of Robinson’s lyrical mastery—her ability to glorify the simple rhythms and textures of everyday experience—they have missed a more complex and insistent commitment to characters who are themselves hopelessly estranged from ordinary life. Where readers have tended to emphasize her novels’ unproblematic trajectories from loss to reconciliation, Tanner calls for a reversal. She observes that “[too] many critics have [End Page 172] [. . .] ignored the way in which loss registers in Robinson’s fiction in the form of a mundane terror that manifests in the disrupted rhythms and disabled experiences of the everyday” (p. 4). This is the core claim of Tanner’s book: in Robinson’s fictional world of Gilead, everyday life is not, in the first place, luminous or sacramental but painfully elusive. Tanner’s discussion of the “everyday” is developed alongside recent work in everyday studies, where the concept is generally understood as life’s “taken-for-granted backdrop” (p. 13). But if this is the right way to think of it, then many of the central characters in Robinson’s fiction stand out as possessing nothing so stable. According to Tanner, the principal actors of Robinson’s novels (Ruth, John Ames, Glory, Lila, Jack) are hyperaware of the stage setting of everyday life precisely as stage setting. Each has experienced a traumatic displacement (abandonment, impending death, loneliness, abuse, addiction) that thrusts the background into the foreground, causing aspects of life that typically go unobserved to receive special emphasis and attention. In some cases, as with Ruth and Ames, Tanner argues, it is this special notice that gives rise to the lyrical reflections that tempt readers to see harmony where there is, in fact, considerable tension. The second main contention of Tanner’s study, then, is that Robinson’s fiction prompts us to expand our notion of everydayness to include people for whom, paradoxically, the “taken-for-granted backdrop” (the “everyday”) involves taking nothing for granted (what we might call, “everydaylessness”). Tanner calls this limbo-state the “uncomfortable ordinary” (p. 8). Tanner’s approach is largely forensic (drawing liberally from the work of neuroscience, psychology, and trauma studies), as she carefully extends her diagnosis to each of Robinson’s five novels: in Gilead (2004), how the experience of dying isolates an elderly man “in the collapsing space between perception and representation” (p. 68); in Home (2008), how certain “scripted performances of the ordinary” conspire to trap a woman “within her role as keeper of a symbolic home” (p. 26); in Lila (2014), how a woman’s “trauma-induced anxiety” is ramified in the novel’s fractured repetitions (p. 26); and in Jack (2020), how someone with a hyperactive “aesthetic sensibility immobilizes and isolates him[self] in an imaginative landscape” (p. 27). Tanner’s emphasis on traumatic displacement is perhaps most at home in Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping (1980). Against early critics who read the novel as a work of feminist liberation, Tanner argues that Ruth’s rejection of the domestic sphere is not an act of inspired self-assertion as much as an elaborate coping mechanism. Ruth’s gorgeous flights of fancy are the means by which she avoids engagement with life. For all their beauty, they are at root an expression of a relentless fear that she is going to be abandoned again. Tanner claims this imminent anxiety both pushes Ruth to cut ties with the world and makes possible the detached attention [End Page 173] that lends her aesthetic reveries such force. This force, however, serves less as a genuine consolation for Ruth’s woes than a kind of sickly manifestation of them. Ordinary life has not been resurrected but embalmed. Tanner’s thesis confronts the reader with the need to discriminate between two importantly distinct cases: on the one hand, instances in which characters merely cope...